The present invention relates to equipment used to alter commercial instruments to allow for proper automatic processing of the instruments and more specifically to an apparatus for selectively securing a strip of encodable material to a document or for removing the strip therefrom.
Due to the enormous numbers of negotiable instruments that pass through the banking system daily, equipment has been developed to automatically process negotiable instruments. The processing of these instrument is generally facilitated by magnetic or optical indicia encoded along the bottom longitudinal edge of the instrument. If the indicia is damaged, obliterated or encoded improperly the instrument cannot be properly processed through the automatic processing equipment. To avoid manual processing of such damaged or improperly encoded instruments, devices have been designed to add a strip of encodable material along the bottom longitudinal edge of the document. A new set of indicia may then be encoded upon the strip allowing automatic processing of the instrument.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,897,299 (Crouse, et al.) and 4,448,631 (Eaton, et al.) each disclose an apparatus for attaching a strip of an encodable material to a document. However, each apparatus disclosed in these patents is relatively complicated, expensive and often unreliable. Each of these patents shows an apparatus that incorporates a complex system of rollers or belts to feed a document and a strip of encodable material into and through the apparatus. The complexity of the system often results in jams or the improper alignment of the strip with the document which prevents automatic processing of the document.
Automatic processing of a document bearing an improperly aligned strip in one of such prior art devices requires the removal of the improperly aligned strip followed by proper alignment of another strip. The removal of the strip often damages the document, and must be accomplished manually, by carefully peeling or cutting the strip from the document, which greatly impedes the entire process and is relatively labor intensive.
Also, the complex designs of the prior art systems are in general inflexible as to how documents may be fed into the apparatus. The mechanisms incorporated into the prior art for feeding documents into the apparatus require that the documents be fed into such an apparatus in one direction, usually downward. By limiting the direction in which documents may be fed into the apparatus, the apparatus is greatly limited as to where it may be placed and the types of automatic feeders that may be used to automatically feed individual documents into the apparatus.
Because of the complexity of the current document modification apparatus and of the inability of such machines to easily and non-manually remove improperly aligned strips, a new apparatus is needed that has a simpler more effective design, has the ability to easily remove as well as attach encodable strips to documents, and is capable of receiving documents from more than one direction.